Highly Detailed Maps Are Designed To Guide Driverless Cars

Autonomous cars have become a common sight on Californian roads. More than 100 self-driving vehicles from various carmakers are being tested now on public roads each year.

Among the cars tested in California, one is different, reports The Economist. The car still has a human driver and it is not driving itself but helps in collecting data to create highly detailed maps. The maps will be used to enable self-driving cars to work autonomous.

The car that helps gathering data to create maps is nicknamed "George" by HERE, a Berlin-based mapping company owned by Daimler, Audi and BMW. George features a high-precision GPS receiver on its roof to collect the car's elevation, longitude and latitude ten times over every second of its journey.

A laser scanner calculated the car distance from some 600,000 different points, such as buildings and trees and a motion-tracking inertial system records its roll, pitch and yaw 100 times every second. At the same time, for every six meters the car moves along the road, for cameras also shoot a 360-degree panoramic image at a resolution of 96-megapixel.

George can accumulate 100 gigabytes or more of data in just one day's driving. All this information allows HERE to build up a high definition (HD) map composed of an extremely detailed three-dimensional image of ca's route.

In a press release, ABI Research explained that an essential next step toward the future of fully driverless cars is creating highly accurate, real-time maps. These maps will need to combine real-time attributes allowing temporal and positional awareness, environmental models and accuracy.  

Dominique Bonte, Managing Director and Vice President at ABI Research said that in the process to design the highly detailed three dimensional maps for autonomous vehicles a crowdsourcing is very important. Automotive companies, such as HERE, can use cloud networking to crowdsource the information necessary to build real-time, highly accurate, precision maps.

The crowdsourcing model is already taking shape in the industry. HERE confirmed talks with Microsoft and Amazon. Mobileye signed collaboration agreements with Nissan, Volkswagen and General Motors.